Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Well, I will first off say that there is no point really discussing plot and character development, because the film takes the bold approach of ignoring such things.  About halfway through the film, at the precise moment where my brain started hurting, I realized that I had to just completely abandon any hopes that the story would be any better than the previous movie, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen.  While I had believed that Revenge of The Fallen had a convoluted story, Dark of the Moon ups the ante to astronomical proportions, and, in the interest of self-preservation, it was best that I just left such things alone.

Characters in the film are just set pieces that exist to spew out expository dialogue and dramatically shout out names of the Transformers periodically.  Sam Witwiky (Shia LaBeouf), who is supposed to be the main character who we cheer for from the previous two installments, has now evolved into an entitled jerk who somehow always seems to get super model girlfriends.  There really is next to nothing likeable about him, and for a lot of the film I was hoping he was going to get squashed by a bulking Decepticon.  I won’t spoil his fate for you, but I will say that I did not feel properly satisfied by the end.

With no plot or interesting characters, we really ended up getting what seems to be the typical Michael Bay movie, which is all about focussing on big effects and big noises.  After an excruciating time watching Revenge of The Fallen, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this film had left behind a lot of the infantile humour and tone from its predecessor and seemed to be a step towards progress.  Where my intelligence and self-respect were under attack while enduring Revenge of The Fallen, I felt free of such assaults with Dark of the Moon.

That is not to say that it was lacking obnoxious elements (such as the aforementioned Witwiky) or what seem to be visual favourites of Bay.  It begins to feel impossible that I will ever see a film of his that does not have a slow motion shot of a person getting out of a vehicle, a slow motion shot of someone staring at something with much conviction on their face, and a slow motion shot of a helicopter.  It all does begin to feel so redundant and that we are merely treading over the same ground, time and time again.

I was, however, able to find some level of entertainment in the movie.  Perhaps that was because I was able to view it as a purely visceral experience without having to grind through juvenile humour about farts and robotic testicles.  The effects in the film where brilliant, and the flow of them seemed to be cut and inserted into the movie in a more flowing form that the previous film.  What ended up happening was that I actually enjoyed myself on some level, which I am not ashamed to admit.

This is the type of movie that I could see a number of people liking for its action sequences, but as a whole, it still was just not there for me.  While so many elements were an improvement over the last film, it is still a film that is ultimately lacking in a well-rounded presentation.  It is never a good sign when I am cheering for the protagonist to be offed by any means possible, willing to accept anything from giant explosion to simple food poisoning from cross contamination due an improper kitchen cleaning regiment.  The film succeeded in not feeling like a complete waste of time, but that is never a shining endorsement.

Rating – 2 out of 4 stars

Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen

Because of an upcoming Transformers movie this summer, as well as being a little down on Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain from last year, I thought that instead of just getting on the gripe train of big loud Bay movies it would be good if I spent some time and watched the second and third movies in the Transformers franchise.  The last thing I want is to start to develop notions of people’s skills and styles without giving the proper amount of chances.  Sure, I had this belief that a Michael Bay film will be filled to the gills with music, an overabundance of loud special effects, and plenty of slow motion shots of things that do not need slow motion, such as people getting out of cars, people looking up, people walking, and a helicopter flying through the skies as the camera looks up at someone’s face.

Going into Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, I made all the best efforts to view the movie as it was and not for what I expected.  I would rather be the person who defends something than the person who attacks it.  It is easy to get on the train of malcontent and ride into the verbal fray with everyone else, but it takes intelligence and backbone to present an argument to the contrary.

I have none.  Nothing.  I have nothing at all to say to come to the defence of this film.  After I was immediately boxed in the ears by sound effects from the arrival of the Paramount logo, and then doused with more audio assault with countless scenes that were drowned in music that felt forced and out of place, as well as sound effects that were just as jarring, I knew that I was in for a very long ride.  Although, I don’t think that ‘jarring’ is the best way to describe this movie.  While elements may be appropriately described as such, the majority of the film just suffers from a complete lack of cohesion as it bumbles through the dark, looking for a sane plot and decent characters that it knows it may have left behind with the original film.

I know that not all movies need to make perfect sense, and that there is something about mindless, big budget, popcorn munchers that can be fun to watch.  I do enjoy a visceral waste of time on the big screen as much as anyone, but I also don’t want to feel like I was treated like an idiot for slapping down money to be there.  A movie can be simple and effective, but it starts to fall apart when we begin to feel like our intelligence is being insulted or that we are just being given something that is a sequel for sequel’s sake.

Transformers was nowhere near a perfect movie, but I was able to find a lot of fun in it.  The visuals were spectacular, but it also had some semi-interesting characters and brought in a bit of humour as well.  The parents of the main character were funny in the first movie, but in a relatable way.  Their personalities were turned up to eleven, but they did not seem like caricatures.  This time around, they are simply just spilling grade two level ‘humour’ in a way that makes it feel like the production team is mechanically extracting it from their souls.

This movie really feels like the Jar Jar Binks of sequels.  It is overly goofy, it is awkward, it attempts some level of seriousness, and someone thought that it was a good idea.  There is absolutely no cohesion to this film.  It is just random elements of a movie that feel thrown together to somehow get the audience from one fight scene to another.  The humour in this film is so dumbed down that it relies on jokes about dogs humping dogs, legs being humped, and farts.

This lack of cohesion that I mention comes from just an unfortunate script that was penned by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman, all people who have worked on some quality projects in the past.  I do not know what happened here, but it just turned into a miserable outing of being hauled through the slop.  An example that I like from the film is when our hero, Sam, gets attacked by a bunch of mini-transfomers out of the blue, he yells to his Autobot guardian Bumblebee, who comes to his aid.  After Bumblebee fights them off, Sam then scolds him for coming out in the open and proceeds to tell the transformer that the days of danger are behind him and that he no longer needs a guardian.  I kind of felt like I was losing my mind at this point in the film, and we were just past the introduction.

I could also give other examples that are even more inane, but I won’t waste any of our time doing that.  On the plus side, I did laugh once when John Turturro said a line, and the visuals looked pretty amazing.  Outside of that, it was not a good movie at all.  As I said before, I have no problems with brainless action flicks and believe there is a place for them out there.  Still, to be presented with something that simply throws things at you so randomly for the constant sake of simply getting to the next joke about testicles or the next fight scene gets more than a little annoying.  We want to feel like when we spend our money on a movie we are being treated with respect and our intelligence is not being insulted, and that is what is happening with this movie.

Rating - 1 out of 4 stars

Pain and Gain

With having heard today that Michael Bay will be producing the upcoming remake of The Birds, an announcement that spurred on a lot of personal feelings, I think it is only fitting to look at Pain and Gain, Bay’s voyage into a crime comedy.  Best known for his Transformer franchise, Bay often brings about movies that are visually spectacular yet generally lose focus when it comes down to items such as plot and character development.  Personally, those are two things that I would hold above immaculately rendered explosions, but I cannot blame people for getting excited about eye candy, especially when it is front and centre on the big screen.

In Pain and Gain we have a genre that is outside of the norm for Bay, a story about muscled up gym rats who turn to crimes such as kidnapping and fraud to earn some much desired cash.  The movie was based on the true story of the Sun Gym Gang, and stars Mark Walhberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie as the rogues gallery of villains who have more brawns than brain and end up facing mishap after mishap as they attempt to kidnap and extort a wealthy jerk, played by Tony Shaloub.  One thing this movie teaches us is that iron-pumping alpha males may not make criminal masterminds.

Even though this is not the typical Michael Bay format, it does not take long to see his personal style imprinted all throughout this tale.  I often think of his style as ‘rock and roll directing,’ where things are loud, flashy, and non-stop, and unfortunately this seeped into the bones of Pain and Gain, giving it a feeling of an energy drink commercial at times. 

One aspect that keeps this driving feel throughout the film is the almost continuous assault of music, feeling like the beating heart of a speed freak who has just ran a marathon, drank a case of Jolt Colas (remember those?), and ate chocolate covered espresso beans.  It reminded me of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, where music seems to feel the need to creep into almost every moment to the point of not allowing situations, emotions, and environment settle down on the audience.  I believe the point of this choice was to create a feel to the movie to mimic the roid-raging fellas who like to keep the iron pumping, but it never felt like a match.  In the movie Crank, a film with a speedy pulse as well, I was annoyed by the style but soon appreciated how it went hand in hand with how the film rolled out.  In Pain and Gain there appears to be no real correlation between the flowing of the story (not that I am saying there is much of a flow) and the presentation.  There was also an abundance of slow motions shots for some reason.

For a movie that is a ‘comedy,’ I barely found any moments of laughter as a lot of the jokes seemed almost cruel in nature or extremely immature.  Rebel Wilson was able to bring some humour, charm, and charisma into the film through her performance as Mackie’s girlfriend, but her appearances were few and far between.  Dwayne Johnson also made me laugh a time or two, but not as much as I would have liked to.  His character (which was not based on a real life person, but more of a collection of multiple people) was incredibly simplistic and almost stereotypish in how he behaved, making his motivations almost unbelievable.  There is no point in blaming him, or any of the cast for that matter, as he was working with what he was given.

In the film, the three main characters are portrayed as mostly harmless individuals who just get caught up in a situation that brings about actions that they were not really intending to indulge in, such as torture and murder.  The reality of the case is that the torture was in truth brutal, almost done in good fun, and murder was an intention from the start.  As the film progressed, I was not sure why Bay chose to attempt to make the characters relatable, because they really weren’t, not even in the dumbed down and padded version that we ended up seeing.  Were we supposed to sympathize with these people?  Was the intention that we would see the movie and think about the poor guys who just lost their way?

A bright note in the movie was the underused character of Ed Harris, who played a private investigator (retired, but called in for one more case… yep, cliché) who assisted the kidnap victim in tracking down the people who took everything he had.  Really, Harris should have been the person the story should have followed, as he was someone the audience could relate to and understand.  Instead, he was just another piece in a puzzle and felt like a bunch of mismatched pieces jammed together by a toddler with peanut butter all over his hands.

Normally I do not get too critical of a film that claims it is based on a true story and then deviates away from the truth to get to the story that the director was inspired to tell.  Pain and Gain gets no shelter from this as far as I am concerned, as this was the first movie that I can recall that actually stopped the action well into the film to directly remind the audience that ‘this is still a true story.’  Claims as such made outside the credits, or close to them, just serve as an indicator that something like this has actually happened, but to insert a statement directly in the middle of the tale seeks to assure the audience that it is an accurate story.  Oddly enough, at the moment of the reassurance of the legitimacy of the story, we see a fictional character grilling body parts in a location where it did not happen, and getting reprimanded for it by the character who, in real life, was the one who did the grilling.

The movie really felt like a jumbled mess, aided by the fact that almost every character got a chance to be the narrator, creating a confusion of who this film is really about.  For a crime movie it was not very captivating, and for a comedy it was not very funny.  It was a film that tried to use a flashy approach that works well enough for a popcorn munching blockbuster, but falls extremely short for a ‘based on real life’ movie about some tank top wearing good old boys who commit fraud, kidnapping, and murder.

Rating – 1.5 out of 4 stars